Ho Chi Minh City

A Khmer settlement and port called Prey Nokor stood on this stretch of the Saigon River before Vietnamese migrants moved south in numbers during the 17th century. In 1698 the Nguyễn lords sent Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh to organise the region as Gia Định, and a citadel town grew, trading rice from the delta. Chinese refugees settled to the west and built Chợ Lớn, which remained a separate city until the 1930s.

France took Saigon in 1859 and from 1862 made it the capital of Cochinchina. Engineers filled canals to make boulevards, and within a few decades the city had a cathedral, an opera house, a post office and a reputation among colonials as the Pearl of the Far East, all built on rice and rubber exports and on the labour of a Vietnamese population excluded from most of it. The city also became a centre of anti-colonial organising, and Ho Chi Minh left from its docks in 1911.

From 1955 Saigon was the capital of the Republic of Vietnam and the centre of the American presence, its population swelled by refugees from the countryside. It was attacked during the Tết Offensive of 1968, and on 30 April 1975 North Vietnamese tanks entered the grounds of the Independence Palace, ending the war; the city was renamed after Ho Chi Minh the following year. The post-war decade was hard — nationalised businesses, rationing, and the departure of hundreds of thousands of people by boat, many of them from the Chinese community. The Đổi Mới reforms from 1986 restarted private enterprise, and the city became the motor of the Vietnamese economy. The provincial reform of 2025 merged Bình Dương and Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu into an enlarged city.

Saigon thinks of itself as the open, commercial, informal counterweight to Hanoi: less concerned with protocol, quicker to do business, readier to invite a stranger to sit down and eat. The southern accent merges sounds that northerners keep apart, and most residents still say Saigon in conversation whatever the maps say. Almost everyone is from somewhere else — the delta, the central coast, the highlands — and the city absorbs newcomers without much ceremony.

It is also the most religiously varied city in the country. Large Catholic congregations, many descended from families who moved south in 1954, fill churches on Sunday; Mahayana Buddhist pagodas, Chinese assembly halls in Chợ Lớn dedicated to Thiên Hậu and other deities, Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo communities and a small Muslim population all have their own places of worship. Ancestor altars stand in shops and houses, and incense smoke on the pavement in the seventh lunar month is ordinary.

The performing arts belong to the south as well: cải lương, the reformed opera that grew out of delta towns in the early 20th century, and đờn ca tài tử, the amateur chamber music of the southern delta. Modern Vietnamese pop, film, fashion and start-up culture are largely made here. Daily manners run on coffee, long meals and the pavement — tables, stools, conversation and business all happen outdoors, and the city is at its most sociable between dusk and midnight.

The city had more than 9 million residents before the 2025 mergers, and the enlarged city, which now includes Bình Dương and Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu, counts around 14 million — by far the largest urban area in Vietnam. Millions more commute from the industrial provinces around it. It produces a large share of national economic output through banking, trade, ports, technology, consumer goods and the factories of its outer belt.

Most people live in alleys — hẻm — running back from the main roads: narrow lanes of tall thin houses with shops at street level, where neighbours know one another and much of life happens in the doorway. Around them rise new apartment towers, especially east of the river in Thủ Đức, where campuses and technology parks have been built. Housing costs, an hour or more of commuting by motorbike and the price of schooling are constant concerns.

The day starts before six with markets, exercise in the parks and phở or bánh mì on the way to work, pauses through the fiercest heat and comes alive again in the evening. Rain in the wet season and unusually high tides both flood low-lying districts, a problem made worse by subsidence and building over canals, and air quality is poor on still days. Motorbike traffic, and the slow shift towards metro lines and electric bikes, define the city's arguments about its future.

Southern cooking is sweeter and more herb-heavy than the north's, and Saigon's version adds everything brought by migrants and by the Chinese of Chợ Lớn. Cơm tấm — broken rice with a marinated grilled pork chop, shredded pork skin, a steamed egg and pork cake, and a bowl of sweetened fish sauce — is the signature dish, eaten at any hour. Hủ tiếu, a clear pork-and-prawn noodle soup of Teochew origin, comes dry or in broth and is sold from carts and shophouses; bánh mì, the baguette sandwich of pâté, cold cuts or grilled pork with pickles and coriander, was perfected here.

Phở is eaten everywhere but made southern-style, with a sweeter broth and a plate of bean sprouts, basil, lime and chilli sauces alongside. Bánh xèo, a wide crisp turmeric pancake of prawn and pork folded into lettuce and herbs, bún thịt nướng, grilled pork over cold noodles, and gỏi cuốn, fresh rice-paper rolls, are staples. Chợ Lớn contributes dim sum, roast duck, herbal soups and mì vằn thắn wonton noodles.

Evenings belong to ốc — snails, clams and other shellfish cooked dozens of ways with tamarind, coconut milk, chilli salt or butter and eaten over beer — and to bột chiên, fried rice-flour cakes with egg. Sweets are coconut-based: chè, the family of sweet soups with beans, jelly and fruit, and sinh tố, thick fruit smoothies. Coffee is drunk dark and strong through a metal phin filter, iced with condensed milk, and increasingly as speciality arabica in the city's many roasters; the local beers are Bia Saigon and 333.